Bill Gates says not to worry about AI's energy draw, technology will adapt | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates says not to worry about AI's energy draw, technology will adapt

theregister.com

14 pointsrntn9 comments

I worry about the explosive growth of new datacenters. It is only partially driven by AI, the trend started long before ChatGPT entered the scene.

Where I live, Google is building a huge 860 MW hyperscale datacenter that will require massive amounts of solar and wind to be built in our region, ruining a lot of forests and mountains. It also consumes insane amounts of water.

To put the energy demands into context; 860 MW (7.5 TWh a year) is about 25% of the energy use of all households and the agricultural sector in Norway.

The same is true for other european countries. In Denmark, datacenters now consume 20% of the total energy production. The same is true for Ireland.

Renewable energy is not that green if it only adds energy to the mix on top of fossil fuel use, instead of replacing it.

Solar and wind is resource intensive to build and wind and solar parks can claim large areas of forest and biodiverse nature when installed.

Another local business near me put solar on the roof of their industrial building, and it powers all their delivery cars + their cooling needs for storage. It is owned by the local business, not by an international investment firm, and it does not claim any extra nature when installed. This is how we should use renewables!

An increasing amount of what people produce and consume these days is digital.

I would like to see a law that requires all new big box stores to cover their roofs in solar panels as well as the entire parking lot in raised solar.

Imagine if your car was protected from the elements and charging at the same time while you're inside shopping.

How many megawatts can we generate from covering the rooftops of the existing IKEAs, Walmarts, Targets, Home-Depots etc...

This law exists in the region where Google is building their new datacenters. New buildings are required to produce energy with solar on their roofs.

When Google presented their plans and took questions from the local government, a local politician asked Google why the building plans did not include solar on the roof, and Google answered that it would cost them more and that it was "to late" to change the plans now.

These local governments are no match against huge multi-national corporations. In the end, Google was not required to build solar panels on their roofs. They would rather make long-term deals with power producers in the region that will destroy massive amounts of forest and untouched mountain areas to build huge solar and wind parks. All to save a slump of money.

Google does not care about the environment, that much is clear from seeing this process up close and in my own backyard.

I wonder what percentage of big box stores have roofs / walls strong enough to support retrofitting solar panels onto them. Modern engineering has a tendency to do the bare minimum needed for present day requirements.

Fortunately the parking lots are far larger than the stores and can be easily retrofitted in sections with a minimum of disruption to shoppers.

We can mandate that new box stores to have handle solar panels.

There's this pro-growth pro-tech mantra which seems to be "everything will always be ok" and it just seems there has to be limits to it.

And by the time technology has adapted, there will be an order of magnitude more people using said technology.

It's just like Wirth's law: software will become slower faster than hardware becomes faster.

The only problem with increasing efficiency is Jevon's Paradox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com